5 months to the day post injury, competed successfully at Regionals!

Just 5 months to the day after sustaining her lisfranc fracture/dislocation (20 weeks post reconstruction and 8 weeks post hardware removal surgery), Mia Rose competed on vault at the USAG Region 7 Regional Championships. The meet included qualifying athletes from DE, NJ, PA, VA, WV. This was an amazing accomplishment considering the fact that less than 1/3 of high level gymnasts who sustain this injury ever return to competition, and those who do usually take a year or more to get back. Her doctor had originally told her that she shouldn’t bother trying to get back this season because it generally takes a year to get back. Mia Rose’s determination to beat the odds never wavered and all of her hard work paid off.

Her skills overall are not yet quite back to where she was before her injury (3.5 months of not being able to use her left foot at all did take a toll), but she is getting close and is doing all of her skills in all events at practice now and is moving on to work new next level skills. Every day brings new progress and gets her closer to being even better than she was before this nasty injury. Amazingly some of her skills are already even better now than they were before she got hurt…likely a combination of being physically stronger than ever before after months of 3+ hours a day of conditioning and because of all the mental practice she did when she was unable to do the physical repetitions. Regardless of why, it is a nice little perk as she works to get all of her routines to where she wants them to be and works on her new skills for next season.

Below is the conditioning that she did 5 days a week in addition to an hour of bars each day to fill each 4.5 hour practice while she was non-weight bearing. This workout was created specifically for her by the conditioning coach at her gym and was updated each week in order to continue to help her progress. It wasn’t fun, but Mia Rose liked that it helped her to fill the hours of practice productively and give her a way to measure some real progress when everything else felt like it was on hold. Just so that nobody worries, Mia Rose chose to continue to go to the gym and work out for her full normal practice hours while she was injured…it was not required by the gym or us as her parents. She just desperately wanted to be able to jump right back in at full speed once her foot was cleared by the doctor, and knew that could only happen if she continued to train every uninjured part of her while her foot healed.